got a showing at the GFT. As a kid I’d have been delighted to know that everybody would eventually get into Tolkien. This is back in the days when fantasy was just for total nerds. There were about a dozen to fifteen heavily bespectacled kids – one was a diabetic whose mum had brought him a big box of raisins for a snack. It was great to set eyes on Glasgow’s other dweebs. There was a bit when Aragorn laid into some orcs and we just all went mental. I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you’re part of a big social scene, it’s an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow, wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.
THREE
I know one shouldn’t dwell on the past, so I’ve really tried to put the misery of my secondary education behind me. On the other hand, if I ever meet Steven Tilsbury again, I’m going to bundle him into the back of a campervan, which I’ve had specially adapted by the Chinese military, and he’s going to spend a very difficult nine months strapped to a surgical table, fed intravenously, while I create a masterpiece of suffering with a nail file and a cigarette lighter. STEAL MY FOOTBALL SOCKS WILL YOU STEVEN?
School days are only happy if you have a particular yen to be taught five hours of geography a week by a convicted paedophile. Actually, to be serious, the sex at school was embarrassing. You’d think after 20 years the janitor would know what he’s doing. I still can’t come unless I’m in a small dark room filled with sports equipment.
There’s that amazing cliché that schooldays are the best days of your life. Things have gone very wrong in your life if your best days involved being shouted at by an alcoholic for spelling ‘broccoli’ with two i’s. Anyone who had the best time of their life at school has never licked LSD off what they think used to be a hooker. To be fair I didn’t hate everything about school. I only hated the teachers, the pupils, the lessons, the building, the food, the smell, every second I spent there – but I have to say the driveway was sort of OK.
The journey to secondary school involved taking a bus and then walking for a couple of miles. The walk always had the sun hanging directly in front of me – the Mayans couldn’t have aligned this thing any more directly with the fucking sun. When it had been raining there would be puddles reflecting the light up into your eyes and it felt like walking into the belly of a spacecraft.
Our school was a zoo for children. On my first day I sat shell-shocked at the side of the playground, a complex ballet of dead-arms, gambling, taunts and violence. At one end were railings surrounding a deep staircase into the basement. This was the ‘grog pit’. If someone’s bag could be got off them it would be hurled down these steps. If they went down to fetch it, an animal howl of ‘GROG PIT!’ would go up and the whole school would crowd up onto the railings and spit on them. I saw a tiny first year emerge to jeers, wet and slippery like a newborn calf. I instantly knew that my task for the next five years was to get through this.
Later I found that a big part of surviving was to get yourself a lockable room in which you could sit out lunchtime. Teachers would sometimes give the keys to their classroom to responsible kids, ostensibly to do work. It was actually so these weaker specimens could have a locked door between them and those who wanted to take their money, humiliate them or simply punch them repeatedly in the arms and legs. I was in the Latin Club and half a dozen of us would have lunch there for a couple of years. I’d never studied Latin, and could probably have survived in General Population. Michelle Caldwell was in the Latin Club though, and she tended to cross her legs in a way that let you see up her skirt. I loved Latin Club.
I should probably mention here that the Latin teacher who let us have the room was a nice chap who was the school’s expert on sex education. A spindly, balding man with a ginger homeless beard, he’d occasionally pop up into religious classes and give a lecture on contraception. Apparently the only thing that was allowed was something called the rhythm method, but withdrawal was preferable to, eh, using a condom. I imagined that he practised withdrawal a wee bit himself as he had a noticeable facial twitch. Almost a spasm, it made him look as if he was about to yell out some obscene prophecy. He had nine children.
Even having a room didn’t guarantee safety as often crowds would gather round them like zombies, trying to break in or holding the door closed after the bell so everybody inside would be late for their next class. A guy tried to break into the Latin room one time through one of those little strips at the top of a window, the kind you have to undo with a hook on a stick. He was an enormous, powerful guy – unbelievably tall. I knew his family and they had contacted The Guinness Book of Records because they were convinced that he had the biggest feet of any boy his age in the world. I also knew he was adopted. Who knows how his adoptive parents must have felt as this enormous, villainous cuckoo grew to dwarf them in their home? It was a tense lunchtime, two of us trying to stop the door from being kicked in, the others trying to push these record-breaking feet back out through the window.
There was a lot of behaviour from the kids that just verged on madness. On our first day in technical class we got this long lecture about safety in the classroom. We were all just looking at each other in disbelief thinking, ‘No way! They’re giving us chisels?’ Within seconds of the talk finishing someone blew metal filings into somebody else’s eyes and that was that – a year of technical drawing instead.
One of the technical teachers had a bizarre burbling voice. He was a bit like an incomprehensible version of Bernie Winters. Once he gave me a long talking to and I had genuinely no idea if it was praise or censure. Probably the latter, as I was pish at techie. There was an assignment to build a little bookcase once. I didn’t have a clue so I stole the display model that the teacher had done. Just so it wasn’t too obvious I re-glued the runners on the bottom and ended up with a C.
The technical classes back then were idiotic. Teenage kids are like the A-Team. Give them a few rudimentary objects and they’ll construct a death machine of some kind. By the end of term the class was more tooled up than an Orc army. It’s like a conspiracy. Why don’t they teach kids in poor areas how to be hedge-fund managers and bond traders? Instead they get shown how to make mug trees and spice racks.
Years later I was writing on 8 out of 10 Cats, working on their Big Brother special. I’d watched Big Brother all that week to get up to speed and was pretty horrified.
‘They must really sift through the applicants to find such fucking idiots!’ I groaned. ‘I mean, people aren’t all just fucking idiots are they?’
Jimmy Carr just looked at me patiently and said, ‘Don’t you remember school?’ I suppose that’s true, the place was full of utter goobers. Once we were doing a science experiment in pairs. It was about velocity, so you measured how fast a little car went down a slope with five weights on it, then four and so on, to see if mass affected velocity. I was paired with a big, dotie Of Mice and Men character. I set the car with five weights and went to put it at the start line. He took it from me and ripped three of the weights off. ‘No point using five!’ he scoffed. ‘There’s only fucking two of us.’
Some of my favourite kids at school were the pathological liars. It seems that a tiny but indefatigable percentage of any school population will claim their bones have been replaced with metal and that they hang out with U2. The best one I knew was a boy called Ed Raven. He transferred into our school in second year but looked about eighteen and was sort of a hunchback. He claimed to have been living in Germany, where he was the national BMX champion. He also said he was independently wealthy, owning a meat factory near Berlin. I mean, if you could lie about anything, who would lay claim to a meat factory? Ed Raven would. That was his genius. My friend bumped into him many years later outside Glasgow Uni. Raven was walking with a cane and brushed past him having no time to answer questions. His ship was moored in the Clyde and he had to get back before the crew grew restive.
There
